Coffee Exchange Redux – Architecture Critic Morgan

Tuesday, December 06, 2022

Will Morgan, Architecture Critic

 

The renovation and reopening of the Coffee Exchange is one of the most heartwarming urban design achievements in Providence in ages. The Coffee Exchange makeover is proof that small ventures can be more meaningful than large and flashy megaprojects. Seemingly modest, the renewal of this Wickenden Street landmark is the kind of significant building block that demonstrates how thoughtful, customer-oriented planning can make a real difference to a neighborhood’s success and self-esteem.

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After offering window service for a couple of years during the pandemic, the Coffee Exchange re-opened quietly just before Thanksgiving. To judge from the full house patronage, a lot of coffee mavens are thrilled to have their gathering, reading, studying, catching-up place back. Yet, owner Charlie Fishbein resisted a grand opening (he calls it a “soft opening”), mostly because he wants his business to thrive on service, not hype–he wants the Coffee Exchange to be the “preeminent coffee shop and roaster” in Rhode Island. Having grown comfortably over almost four decades (“it took as much time as it took”), the refreshingly decent Fishbein, is determined to “do the right thing.”

 

But what happens when your business is shuttered by covid? As Fishbein told GoLocal, “Circumstances are now very different: the reputation is there, but the gap in time and experience and staffing and training–even the supplies of good coffee–has changed.” Again, one is bowled over by the coffee master’s incredible honesty and humility. “I’m not going to be able to match my reputation simply by opening the doors. We’ll be ‘back’ when the organic nature of our relationship with our customers says so.”

 

 

Yet, the Coffee Exchange is open and it seems to be as cozy and welcoming as ever. Incredibly, it appears as if nothing has changed–it would feel like a homecoming for a RISD alumnus from the Reagan years returning to Wickenden Street for an espresso. Basically, the business was cleaned up–or what the architect Stephanie Metz calls a “subtle refresh.” The tables are the same, but the counters have been replaced, and the brightwork on the new coffee-making equipment sparkles. Overflow space has been enlarged by the opening of the second floor, which can hold another two dozen customers. The opening of the staircase to the upstairs greatly improves circulation by allowing an easier flow of traffic–an unbroken loop instead of the old U shape.

 

 

The brilliance of the makeover is that it seems to have thoroughly respected and preserved the ambience of the beloved coffee shop. The difference between the Coffee Exchange work and so much hurry-up renovations, is that Fishbein employed the services of a first-rate architect and a knowledgeable contractor to guarantee a smooth revamp.

 

 

 

 

What better builder could Fishbein find than a contractor who has also created his own coffee shop on Smith Hill. Neal Kaplan’s Rise ‘N Shine Coffee Bar on Holden Street was the recipient of this year’s Neighborhood Gem Award from the Providence Preservation Society.

Metz, whose studio is called Purpose + Design, earned her professional degree at the University of Michigan (where she studied with the Australian architect and Pritzker Prize winner Glenn Murcutt). While working in New York with noted domestic designer, Ike Klingerman Barkley, Metz contributed to house designs from California, British Columbia, the Colorado Rockies, and the Bahamas. She and her family moved from Brooklyn, embracing what she calls Providence’s “walkability, diversity, and dose of weirdness.”

In interviewing for the Coffee Exchange job her emphasis on “home” impressed Fishbein, who wanted to “update the space,” but was nostalgically “reluctant to change anything.” There were times when Metz realized she had to “rein in my desire to make a bigger design statement.” The architect wisely understood that her role was to contribute a “homey feeling in a positive way,” so that Fishbein’s long-standing patrons should feel like “they were coming home.”

Rhode Island landscape painter, Mike Carr, has been a barista at Coffee Exchange since forever.

 

 

One can gauge a city’s civility and livability by its concentration of coffee shops. Like libraries and universities, they are engines of democracy–without the coffee houses in Boston and Philadelphia where colonists plotted the overthrow of an English king there might not have been an American revolution.

The Coffee Exchange renovation reminds us that small is beautiful. Preserving and re-energizing the Wickenden Street treasure demonstrates that it is better to do a small thing right than to do a large thing badly.

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